I’d like to share something I found out East at Acorn Community.

If you’ve ever lived with any number of other humans you know the universal pain point that is chores. You’re either doing them all or dealing with passive aggressive notes.

To over come this sticking point Acorn used a weekly process called the ROTA. It’s simply a board with all the weeks chores laid out on a grid. Each week members of the community pass the board around and everyone signs up for particular chores.

I’ve adapted this method to the Sterling home, where I am currently living. Here’s our version.

I’ve split the chores into 3 categories: Daily, Weekly, and Coherence Holding.

Each day is a row and chore is a column.

We started by writing a list of all the daily chores in the house, those go across the top column. Some examples: Cook Breakfast, Clean Breakfast, Empty Dish Washer, Trash…

Along the bottom are weekly tasks.

We chose Sunday to do all weekly tasks. There is plenty of room left for more weekly tasks to get added.

Finally we have the coherence section on the right. Each box represents a different area of the house. When you “hold coherence” for an area you agree to be responsible for that area’s cleanliness and upkeep.

To make it clear what the coherence holder should do we created a kanban for each area.

Each day the coherence holder can simply look over the Kanban and see what needs to get done. Someone else might sweep the floor of the kitchen as a daily chore, but it’s up to the kitchen coherence holder to make sure it’s done.

A note on areas: These don’t have to be rooms. For instance one of our areas is “The Hounds” which means making sure that the dogs get looked after.

Bonus! you can add calendar notes along the side where the days are!

Weekly Meetings

Once the ROTA board is made you’ll need to hold weekly meetings to set the board. We put stickies down in turns (2 at a time) until all the spots are filled. The first person to go is determined randomly.

Make your own!

It’s simple.

1. List your daily chores.
2. List Weekly chores.
3. List all the areas that require attention.
   • Put all the tasks each room requires on a kanban, you can add more over time!
4. Integrate it into any regular meetings you have.